The Hypocrisy of “United Methodist Loyalty” Rants

Lately, there has been a rash of heavy-handed, extraordinarily hypocritical demands by liberal United Methodist leaders for loyalty to the present leadership and structures of United Methodism. This can even amount to pressuring faithful United Methodists to profess their innocence by renouncing possible private thoughts or plans to the contrary.

In the context of our denomination’s ongoing, slow-motion split, the practical effect and obvious goal of such efforts has been to purge theologically orthodox believers from denominational leadership. Even the possibility of such persons considering transferring into the Global Methodist Church (GMC), at any point in the future, serves as a convenient pretext.

This dramatically undermines the credibility of “Stay UMC” rhetoric claiming that the post-separation United Methodist Church (psUMC) will welcome theological traditionalists.  

I have heard anecdotally of bishops pressuring potentially GMC-minded individuals to resign from conference leadership positions. Then last week, all five U.S. jurisdictions of our denomination reportedly adopted a resolution, supposedly concerned about “Leading with Integrity.” This cookie-cutter resolution declares that denominational leadership must be limited to only those planning to remain United Methodist indefinitely, and urges any “who intend to disaffiliate” at some point to step down from any district, annual conference, jurisdictional, or denomination-wide leadership roles. It calls for developing “codes of conducts” to bring further pressure. 

In my own North Central Jurisdiction, an additional liberal-introduced resolution (found on pages 110-116) went further, accusatorially suggesting that some delegates’ “allegiance” was in question. That resolution included a “Code of Ethics for General and Jurisdictional Conference Delegates” for delegates to individually sign to confirm that we “agree to comply” with demands to recuse ourselves in vaguely indicated “conflict of interest” situations, and to submit to our delegation chairs’ enforcement of the Code. Upon careful reading, I believe I could have signed my agreement to every sentence of this one-page “Code of Ethics” with integrity. But I still did not plan to sign, as a matter of principle, and because of my lack of trust of how some may have intended to weaponize this Code. By citing several instances of church law that have made clear a jurisdictional conference’s lack of authority to impose such demands on us delegates beyond what is specified in the UMC Book of Discipline (Judicial Council Decisions # 592, 605, 1340, and 1403), I was able to ensure that this resolution was ultimately de-fanged before being adopted with diluting amendments. But damage was already done. This proposal’s publication as part of the Advance Journal for our jurisdictional conference effectively discouraged some conservative delegates from even attending. 

During the South Central Jurisdiction, aggressively liberal Pastor Stan Copeland of North Texas gave a speech targeting three bishops from the jurisdiction, Bishops Mike Lowry (who has since transferred into the Global Methodist Church), Robert Hayes (who retired six years ago), and Scott Jones (who is retiring at the end of the year). Even in retirement, the liberal harassing does not stop! As summarized by the United Methodist News Service, “Copeland said they have harmed The United Methodist Church by acting in support of churches disaffiliating and need to be held accountable.” Bishop Cynthia Harvey, who was presiding at that time, should have dismissed Copeland’s diatribe as inappropriate. Instead, she offered to address Copeland’s bullying demand. Harvey has her own record of bullying, from inappropriately pressuring Bishop Lowry out of the UMC prematurely, to mean-spiritedly stealing hymnals from disaffiliating congregations, to forcing very costly concessions fofrom traditionalists in negotiating the “Protocol” separation treaty only to later, after these concessions were secure, apparently betray her end of the bargain.

Of course, there is something extraordinarily strange about seeing a supposedly Christian denomination consumed with pressuring individuals to profess their unconditional and indefinite loyalty to the present regime, rather than to Christ or even the church’s doctrine, and suggesting people should prove that they are innocent of even having privately disloyal thoughts or potential plans. This is the sort of thing that characterizes the most extreme dictatorships or dystopian fiction. Indeed, in the Northeastern Jurisdiction, New York clergy delegate Chongho Kim decried the “Leading with Integrity” resolution as “totalitarianism” intended to intimidate people, as well as “white liberal racism.”

Such pressures of United Methodist loyalty were defended with people saying that in becoming lay members of this denomination, we promised to be loyal to the United Methodist Church. But this rationale revealingly leaves out a key part of what the membership vow of UMC Discipline ¶217.5 actually says, that we promise “To be loyal to Christ through The United Methodist Church…” (emphasis added). Removing the centrality of loyalty to Jesus Christ, and shifting primary loyalty to the UMC’s present fallible human leadership and structures, is no small thing. But then again, the mood of delegates last week showed an odd ranking of priorities, promoting uniformity in loyalty to liberal causes and institutional idolatries, combined with elevating the relativistic theology that in the UMC, “it is not important that we agree on who Christ is.”

These heavy-handed demands for United Methodist loyalty are hypocritical on several levels.

One obvious hypocrisy is how the very same liberal delegates pushing and voting for the anti-conservative “Leading with Integrity” resolution also pushed and voted for the “Queer Delegates’ Call to Center Justice and Empowerment.” The latter resolution (see Part 1 and Part 2) called for predominantly white church leaders in the USA to effectively disregard the UMC’s sexual-morality standards. This resolution and its backers therefore showed extreme “disloyalty”—to Scripture, the historic ecumenical consensus, the UMC’s official values, and the official UMC process for deciding matters via a global General Conference rather than American unilateralism.

And I have not seen anyone now demanding such United Methodist loyalty commitments from conservatives complain about liberal delegates like Dorothee Benz and Alex da Silva Souto voting at the 2019 General Conference, even though they left the UMC shortly afterwards. For them, the standard is apparently “oh well, people change denominations all the time.”

Again, the clear design of such United Methodist loyalty demands is to purge conservatives from positions of influence and replace them with liberals. Some liberals’ half-hearted attempts to deny this might have had some credibility if last week’s jurisdictional conference had involved choices of significantly including conservatives in leadership. But instead, liberal jurisdictional leaders chose to show little to no mercy in relentlessly pushing to shame, silence, and marginalize traditionalist United Methodists. And in the Northeast, liberals went to rather extreme, church-harming lengths to ensure that not even one of 14 newly elected bishops could be even moderately theologically traditionalist.

Those of us who expect to eventually be in the GMC, but in the meantime have been duly chosen for various UMC leadership positions, have every right to remain in our positions as long as we meet the Discipline’s qualifications. We are United Methodists until the day we are not. Like Benz and da Silva Souto, we may plan or even expect to someday no longer be United Methodists in certain circumstances. But like those planning business ventures tomorrow in James 4:13-16, we do not know for sure what will happen until the time comes. Even if our own congregation has voted to disaffiliate, the fact is that we do not know, for sure, whether or not our congregation will actually be allowed to leave until our annual conference actually votes to allow the disaffiliation. Furthermore, if all of the bishops of our denomination suddenly met the very low bar of actually doing their jobs by enforcing United Methodist moral standards and defending our doctrine, then the calculus about leaving the UMC may change very quickly.

Furthermore, those demanding United Methodist loyalty commitments now are simultaneously making the denomination increasingly intolerable for theological traditionalists who may have previously been inclined to “stay UMC.” Thus, premature insistence on unconditional loyalty to the UMC’s present leaders amounts to hypocritically demanding a blank check, while refusing to act in good faith towards those giving the check. 

Our denomination would simply not be splitting as it is, and the Global Methodist Church would not exist, if the lavishly salaried bishops of the United Methodist Church had not been openly promoting defiance of the moral rules they are entrusted with upholding, and did not include bishops who deny such core doctrines as the sinlessness or physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are now splitting precisely because one faction of the church includes as leaders many clergy who have cynically infiltrated our denomination (as the book of Jude warns) by dishonestly claiming to be loyal to our doctrine and our Discipline. And after being admitted into clergy leadership on the basis of their false promises, infiltrator clergy have destructively undermined our standards from within, now to the point that the UMC has become ungovernable.

Delegates who support the official standards of our own denomination are not the ones with an integrity problem. Neither are bishops like Lowry, Hayes, and Jones who have upheld the Discipline and whose only great crime appears to be helping make people aware of and able to exercise options that the Discipline offers them.

The replacement of the UMC with two fundamentally new denominations, the liberal psUMC and the orthodox GMC, was legitimized by the announcement of the “Protocol” separation proposal. This necessarily launched preparations for the GMC as the denomination for United Methodists who would consistently continue with the UMC’s doctrinal and moral standards. One could thus argue that the GMC is a more legitimate heir of United Methodism than the psUMC. In any case, the Protocol was initially publicly endorsed by the liberal Uniting Methodists and UMC Next caucuses (Copeland is listed as a member of both group’s leadership teams) and others, before they more recently turned against the Protocol.

If liberals had acted in good faith to keep their end of the bargain, we would have enacted the
Protocol and had more amicable separation earlier this year. Furthermore, the earlier expectation was that there would be no bishop elections, at least in the USA, until 2024, in order to avoid needlessly complicating the separation. And it remains legally questionable and demonstrably unfair how U.S. jurisdictions have rushed ahead to elect new bishops this month, even without General Conference meeting first and even without Africans, who have much greater need, getting to elect their own new bishops.

Liberal leaders cannot have it both ways. They cannot go out of their way to derail amicable separation from happening, effectively preventing most GMC-minded United Methodists from being able to leave by now, and then be taken seriously when they try to guilt, shame, or blame us for not being gone already. 

This history leads to some very practical concerns. Even after this year, most of those who will eventually be in the GMC will still be in the United Methodist Church. Bishop elections and other leadership decisions made in this interim period will have significant impacts on many who will eventually be in the GMC, but for now remain in the temporarily-shared, not-yet-completely-split denomination. 

Even for those of us whose annual conferences are having disaffiliation-focused special sessions this fall, I expect that for all (or at least most) traditionalist delegates, the majority of those who voted to elect us in 2019 will still be United Methodists after 2022. Those of us in delegations and other leadership positions have every right to continue advocating for the concerns of the traditionalist constituency we represent. 

The hypocrisy of United Methodist loyalty demands was vividly seen in responses to traditionalist attempts to amend the “Leading with Integrity” resolution.

In the Southeastern Jurisdiction, a traditionalist suggested amending this call for “all who intend to disaffiliate from The United Methodist Church to recuse themselves” from denominational leadership positions, by making a similar request of “those who intend to openly violate the Book of Discipline” (see pages 11-12). But the conference voted overwhelmingly to essentially reject that amendment. 

Copeland, Harvey, and others promoting such United Methodist loyalty demands have not shown similar concern over flagrant betrayals of the UMC’s official standards and teachings in our Book of Discipline. Indeed, Copeland’s Uniting Methodists and UMC Next caucuses were founded with a focus on effectively rewarding and protecting leaders who have betrayed their vows to the UMC to uphold our denomination’s standards.

In the North Central Jurisdiction, one traditionalist delegate made a much more modest attempt to amend the same resolution. She respectfully highlighted the unfairness of how those of us who are loyal to our denomination’s historic and still-official doctrinal and moral standards are the ones being driven out. Her amendment merely asked for the jurisdiction’s dominant revisionist faction to acknowledge “that integrity and grace is [also] shown in allowing for free and open discussion” as congregations consider their disaffiliation options. Some 80 percent of the conference voted to refuse to offer even this minimal olive branch to adherents of United Methodist doctrine.

Cheered on by the Reconciling Ministries Network and other liberal activists, Copeland infamously said of bishops who are allegedly disloyal and in need of accountability, “one cannot play for the Astros and pitch for the Phillies.”

The United Methodist loyalty being demanded with such bullying and shaming tactics is not a primary loyalty to Christ through the medium of the UMC, nor a loyalty to enduring biblical values, nor a loyalty to official UMC doctrine, and nor even the minimal loyalty of treating United Methodists in good faith by respecting the UMC’s official processes and rules. Rather, it is a loyalty to particular persons and bureaucratic structures currently in power.

This new regime is using an odd dictionary when their definition of “integrity” does not include leaders keeping their word, following the rules, or doing the jobs entrusted to them, but in fact is used to push out those who actually follow the rules, keep their promises, and honor God through upholding orthodox doctrine.

And this new regime is using an odd dictionary when accountability is something that is needed only for bishops who keep the faith and uphold church rules, but not for bishops who destructively betray church rules, deny the physical resurrection or sinlessness of Jesus Christ, trivialize the importance of a high view of Jesus Christ, or publicly encourage “heretics” to “lead the church forward.”

Welcome to the new United Methodist Church.